England under the Tudors

by Arthur D. Innes

[Sidenote: The Church]

To a certain extent, then, we have to note among the causes of change in rural districts the failure of the monasteries to discharge their old function of agricultural leadership. In other respects, also, these communities had fallen from the high standards of earlier days. Discipline was lax. Visitations instituted by Cardinal Morton revealed the presence of gross immorality, not only among the very small houses, but in so great an institution as the Abbey of St. Albans, where the highest officials were guilty of the gravest misbehaviour; and the correspondence seems to imply that the disapprobation was by no means in proportion to the offences, from which it is fair to infer that no high standard was normally expected. The most to be looked for was an absence of flagrant misconduct. The clergy were much more particular about ceremonial observances and ecclesiastical privileges than about the morals either of themselves or of their flocks. But as yet there was no sign of a coming Reformation. Lollardry, it is true, had never been killed; its anti-clerical propaganda was by no means inactive. But it worked beneath the surface, and could not be taken to indicate an approaching convulsion. The greatest Churchmen of the day, Morton, Warham and Fox, were absorbed—albeit reluctantly—in affairs of State. Blameless, even austere in their own lives, patrons of learning, sincerely pious, they lacked the Reformer's passion, without which it was vain to combat the vis inertiae; generated by long years of clerical sloth, and of the formalism by which the highest Mysteries were vulgarly distorted into superstitions and Faith into ceremonial observances.

[Sidenote: Henry and Rome]

The first Tudor himself was a pious man, as piety was reckoned: punctual in observances, commended and complimented by Popes. His chapel in Westminster Abbey is evidence of his zeal in one direction; he gave alms with a business-like regard to their post-mortem efficacy. Throughout his reign the Popes made much talk of a new crusade, and Henry seems to have been the one European monarch who took the idea seriously. It is true that when Alexander VI. appealed in 1500 for funds to that end, the English King preferred to be excused; but the polite irony of his refusal was more than justified by his confidence that if the Pope got the money it would not be expended for the benefit of Christendom; moreover, he did actually hand over four thousand pounds. In fact, he took the Church as he found it. There was but one almost infinitesimal curtailment of ecclesiastical privileges in his reign, necessitated by political considerations and accepted by the Pope, whereby the right of Sanctuary was withdrawn in cases of treason.

[Sidenote: Learning and letters]

Practically it is only in the beginnings of an educational revival that we find promise of the dawn of a new order. It was in Henry's reign that the study of Greek, and with it the new criticism, began to establish itself. Grocyn and Linacre led the way. In the last decade of the century John Colet was lecturing at Oxford, the apostle of the new learning on its religious side; calling his pupils to the study of the Scriptures themselves, rather than of the schoolmen or doctors of the Church; treating them as organic treatises, not as collections of texts. There he won the friendship of young Thomas More; thither on flying visits came Erasmus twice. Colet, made Dean of St. Paul's about 1505, continued to carry on his educational work as the founder of the famous St. Paul's School; winning renown also as a great preacher and a fearless moralist; a man of rich learning, of a reverent enthusiasm, of a splendid sincerity, of a noble simplicity; the prophet of much that was best, and of nothing that was not best, in the coming Reformation.

But during Henry's reign Colet's figure is almost the only one—apart from such representatives of erudition and scholarship as Grocyn and Linacre— which stands forth holding out a promise of intellectual and moral progress. In effect there was no literature; in this respect Scotland was in advance of England with the verse of William Dunbar. More's Utopia was still unwritten. When Henry died the Universities had not yet, or had only just, received within their portals the men who were to fight the theological battle of the Reformation. More than half a century was to pass before the splendid sunrise of the Shakespearian era.

[Sidenote: Henry's character]

It has hardly, perhaps, been the custom to render full justice to the founder of the Tudor dynasty. His reign is stamped with a character sordid and unattractive. There is no romance in it, no clashing of arms, no valiant deeds, no suggestion of the heroic. The King's enemies are, for the most part, contemptible persons; the King himself is a cold-blooded, long-headed ruler, merciful indeed, but from policy, not from generosity, and of a meanness in money matters very far from royal. Yet he was not without virtues. He was not unjust; he was a statesman more loyal to his pledges than most of his contemporaries or their successors. He gave something like order and rest to a distracted land, and raised her again to a position at least respectable among the nations, securing himself on a most unstable throne without resorting to the usual methods of the tyrant. Had he died when Morton died, the baser aspects of his reign would never have achieved so unlovely a prominence as they have done.

The truth is, indeed, that judged by the first half of his reign alone Henry might have been numbered among the princes with a title to be regarded almost with affection. It is only in the light of the later years that even his financial policy really assumes a mean aspect, though occasionally it came perilously near what may be called sharp practice—and the excuse was great, seeing that a full treasury was an absolutely necessary condition of establishing the new rule. The imprisonment of Warwick was an act of palpable injustice, yet the risk of letting him go free would have been enormous. In another ruler than Henry, the leniency which we attribute to astute policy would have been freely described as surprising magnanimity. He never betrayed a loyal servant. His genuine appreciation of the true spirit of chivalry was shown when he took Surrey [Footnote: Surrey, the son of "Jockey of Norfolk," Richard's supporter, was imprisoned in the Tower. At the time of Simnel's insurrection his gaoler offered to let him escape, but he refused, saying that the King had sent him to confinement, and only from the King would he accept release.] from the Tower to entrust him with high command in the North. The luckless Lady Katharine Gordon, the wife of Perkin Warbeck, was treated with remarkable courtesy and liberality. There was even a genial humour in the King's behaviour to Kildare. His own marriage he doubtless looked upon as a purely political affair; but while his wife lived his loyalty to his marriage vow is in strong contrast to the general licentiousness of the princes of his day; and the picture of Henry and Elizabeth striving in turn to comfort each other on Prince Arthur's death, as recorded by a contemporary, [Footnote: Gairdner, Chron., i., p. 36; Leland's Collectanea, v., p, 373.] can hardly be fitted on to the conception of Henry as a man almost without the more tender feelings of humanity.